Lauren Frayer
Lauren Frayer covers India for NPR News. In June 2018, she opened a new NPR bureau in India's biggest city, its financial center, and the heart of Bollywood—Mumbai.
Before moving to India, Lauren was a regular freelance contributor to NPR for seven years, based in Madrid. During that time, she substituted for NPR bureau chiefs in Seoul, London, Istanbul, Islamabad, and Jerusalem. She also served as a guest host of Weekend Edition Sunday.
In Europe, Lauren chronicled the economic crisis in Spain & Portugal, where youth unemployment spiked above 50%. She profiled a Portuguese opera singer-turned protest leader, and a 90-year-old survivor of the Spanish Civil War, exhuming her father's remains from a 1930s-era mass grave. From Paris, Lauren reported live on NPR's Morning Edition, as French police moved in on the Charlie Hebdo terror suspects. In the fall of 2015, Lauren spent nearly two months covering the flow of migrants & refugees across Hungary & the Balkans – and profiled a Syrian rapper among them. She interviewed a Holocaust survivor who owed his life to one kind stranger, and managed to get a rare interview with the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – by sticking her microphone between his bodyguards in the Hague.
Farther afield, she introduced NPR listeners to a Pakistani TV evangelist, a Palestinian surfer girl in Gaza, and K-pop performers campaigning in South Korea's presidential election.
Lauren has also contributed to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the BBC.
Her international career began in the Middle East, where she was an editor on the Associated Press' Middle East regional desk in Cairo, and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Syria and southern Lebanon. In 2007, she spent a year embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, an assignment for which the AP nominated her and her colleagues for a Pulitzer Prize.
On a break from journalism, Lauren drove a Land Rover across Africa for a year, from Cairo to Cape Town, sleeping in a tent on the car's roof. She once made the front page of a Pakistani newspaper, simply for being a woman commuting to work in Islamabad on a bicycle.
Born and raised in a suburb of New York City, Lauren holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from The College of William & Mary in Virginia. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, rusty French and Arabic, and is now learning Hindi.
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Death rates are high in India, but the rate of new cases is slowing down.
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As India's daily COVID-19 tallies fall, the vaccination race is on to head off another deadly wave. The government is rationing doses and the CEO of its biggest vaccine manufacturer has fled.
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India's new social media rules give the government power to block certain content and break encryption. It's the latest in a standoff over censorship, privacy and free speech.
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India's COVID-19 outbreak has spread to neighboring Nepal, where it's straining an even smaller, less-resourced health system. The virus has even reached Mount Everest, where climbers have fallen ill.
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Thousands of Indians recovering from COVID-19 have come down with a rare fungal infection that's killing 50% of its victims. Doctors have had to remove patients' eyes and jawbones to save them.
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With medical board exams postponed because of COVID-19, India's junior doctors have been thrust onto the front lines early. Many have seen more death & grief than they expected in an entire career.
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The world's biggest vaccine producer, the Serum Institute in India, says it won't export any more COVID-19 vaccines until the end of the year — leaving dozens of countries without supplies.
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At least 16 people have been killed by Cyclone Tauktae, the most powerful storm to hit India's west coast in decades. Among those evacuated to higher ground were COVID-19 patients.
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A powerful cyclone slammed India's west coast, knocking out power, flooding slums and complicating COVID-19 relief efforts.
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The extent of COVID-19's wrath in rural India is not fully known. Hospitals are full. Testing is scant, illiteracy is high and most deaths are never registered.
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After seven years in the U.S., a husband and wife returned to their native India to be close to their parents. But they had less time than they hoped, losing both their fathers to COVID-19 last month.
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India's daily coronavirus infection rates have topped 400,000. But official numbers are considered to be an undercount as the country's heath care system struggles to test and treat patients.